Cutter and Bone
Page 22
And Bone waited. Feeling like a ticking bomb, he leaned back and waited for the minutes to drop away one by one and free him in the end. He was in no hurry. He tried not to let on how he felt or what lay ahead of him, just sat there calmly drinking with the other two, a little faster than he normally did perhaps. But they did not notice. Swanson was busy giving Cutter counsel. He knew how hard it would be for Alex to stand by and watch Mo’s parents take over, take the bodies back to Beverly Hills and arrange the funeral and everything, probably even exclude him from the proceeding altogether. But Swanson advised him not to do anything about it, to accept it.
And Cutter nodded indulgently. “Don’t worry about it, George,” he said. “Funerals ain’t my forte. If it was left up to me, the bodies probably wouldn’t even get buried.”
The coarseness of the remark seemed to upset Swanson. Taking a deeper drink than was his custom, he wound up choking and coughing, and Cutter reached over and patted him on the back.
“Don’t sweat it, old buddy,” he told him. “They’re dead now. Gone. Hell, those things over there ain’t even bodies—they’re remains.” His voice scorned the word. “So let old Mom and Pop have ’em. Let them have all the goddamn ceremonies they want. I got other business.”
Swanson did not ask him what it was. He was sure about one thing, he said—Alex was coming to stay at his place. And it wasn’t going to be some little overnight thing either, not if he could help it. No, Alex was going to have his own room and money too, and above all, time. Time to get his head on straight again. And Swanson didn’t care if it took him a month, a year, or five years—he’d still be welcome.
“You remember that spring vacation your folks took me with you, to Sun Valley?” he asked.
Cutter’s eye was distant, bleak. “Vaguely,” he said.
“Well, that was the biggest thing that ever happened to me as a kid, the first skiing I’d ever done. And the first real living. I haven’t forgotten it—even if you have. So you’re staying with us, Alex. Open end.”
Cutter looked over at Bone and grinned. “Well, I’ve finally got it made,” he said, lifting his glass. “Let’s drink to George’s place. My new home. Requiescat in pace.”
It was close to noon when Bone left them, claiming that he had to get the pickup truck back to Mrs. Little. Instead he bought a pint of scotch at a nearby liquor store and drove up to Franceschi Park at the top of the Riviera. It was a small park, not much more than a few acres of grass fringed with eucalyptus trees and three or four picnic tables. And though it offered a stirring view of the coast, that was not the reason he had chosen it. More important to him was its remoteness, its distance from the beaten tourist path. He figured that with any luck at all a man would be able to drink there in peace for hours. And that was just what he planned to do.
The only other persons he could see in the park were two lovers sitting on a table at the far end, the girl leaning back between the man’s legs as they both stared out at the sea, its great sweep somehow diminished by the oil-drilling platforms strewn along the channel, like an armada of monstrous crabs. Bootlegging the bottle of scotch, Bone made his way down through the trees until he found a place to his liking, a flat grassy niche in the rocks, with a slight overhang above. Sitting down, he opened the bottle and took a deep pull on it, so much he almost gagged as it went down. And he thought about what he was doing, why he had to get drunk this day. He did not think it was because of his feelings of guilt and remorse, that they were insupportable. They should have been, he knew. But they were not. And he did not believe the reason was simple grief, the knowledge that she was gone now, gone forever, and the baby with her—the terrible and final knowing that he would not see her again, not talk with her, not hold her, not ever. This knowledge, this grief, had become for him an unrelieved and oddly localized pain, as if an artery in his chest had burst and was now spilling his life there. Even this he could have endured, however, could have faced it sober. He did not need the liquor for that, nor as a kind of ritual thing, part of some private memorial service, a lone man’s wake. No, he imagined that the reason for the bottle was simply that he did not care to live through the rest of this day as his customary self, his sober self, Old Faithless in the mirror. Today he needed to take his eye off the ball. He needed an unsteady hand and an unsure foot. He needed a vacation from the grubby little scavenger that was Richard Kendall Bone.
So he drank. Like some poor skid row wino he huddled back in his little hole and nipped steadily at the bottle, carefully building his oblivion. And it came as slowly and surely as twilight, the brilliant spring sun dulling to a kind of diurnal moon that muted all color and softened the biting edges of the world stretched out below him, and in time the pain in his chest began to ease and he found entire minutes passing without his hearing her voice asking him to stay, asking him if he would be there when she woke, and then his own voice answering: Sure, go to sleep now, Mo, rest.
He finished the bottle and left the park, drunk, but not so drunk he was unaware of it. Nevertheless he made no allowance for his condition and drove recklessly, jockeying the truck like a stoned teenager through the afternoon traffic. And instead of choosing a safe bar like Murdock’s he stopped in the barrio and entered a Chicano joint where he knew Anglos were not welcome. He did not bother to specify scotch and so found himself drinking bourbon, standing there at the bar in the seedy storefront tavern putting down shot after shot as if he were trying to slake an honest water-thirst, all the while vaguely aware that the bartender and the other patrons were watching him, in fact had put him at the center of their attention like a cock in a pit. He remembered later sitting at a table for a while, and perhaps even dozing for a time. And he had a vague recollection of some kind of trouble in the men’s room, some pushing and shoving and a tall thin young Mexican groaning on the floor in front of the urinal, and there was blood, Bone’s own blood running down his chin and soaking his shirt. And then, abruptly, it seemed he was outside, wandering up and down the street looking for the truck, and finding it eventually with the keys still in the ignition—a discovery that for some reason amused him greatly and had him laughing out loud as he drove off, not knowing where he was headed. Evidently the traffic flow was easier to the south, for that was the direction he took, crossing the freeway and winding up on Cabrillo Boulevard, which he followed past the yacht harbor to the Leadbetter Beach parking lot, where he left the truck.
The moment his feet touched sand he knew he had come to the right place, that this had been his true destination all day long, only for some reason he had overlooked it, had forgotten that on this day above all others he had to run, and run, run like that poor long-striding adolescent mark in freshman track, run as if the old life depended on it, yes, run Richard Bone right down into the sand, run him until he was stump-legged and windless, broken, his heart a pump of piss and bile. And so he started out, heading into a real twilight now, a dim fogged shore strewn with kelp and lost dogs and lovers and lonely old men.
Bone ran past them all, sometimes veering into the surf and stumbling back out and plunging on. And within minutes, it seemed, he had come to the end of the beach, the point under the cliffs where the tide each day gave and then withdrew strips of narrow rocky sand, isolate and wind. This day the tide was taking, rising to turn the gray ribbon of beach into separate headlands cleaving the waves as they thundered in. So part of the time Bone was running knee-deep in water, fighting through it to another strip of beach and then on into the water again.
And suddenly it occurred to him that there would never be a better time to go for a swim, to try for that hundred yards too far. Immediately he began to stagger and hop about the small stretch of beach, trying to get out of his sea-wet clothes. And when he made it finally he stood there naked for a few moments, breathing deeply, preparing himself for the initial assault against the breakers, which he knew would be the most difficult part of the swim, the part like climbing a mountain in the midst of an avalanche.
Go to sleep now. Rest. I’ll be here, yes.
And that was what he remembered, the logs coming to rest in the water and his head settling back just as hers had done, his body arching the same way, and then plunging, going deep into his own forever sea.
But all he found was sand, another small prow of beach where a driftwood fire burned and voices fell over him like salt spray, cool stinging voices laughing at what the sea had coughed up. And then there were blankets dropped over his shaking shoulders and a bottle at his mouth, wine as sickly sweet as Kool-Aid followed by the dryness of smoke, grass smoke instead of wood, balm for his savaged lungs. There was flesh with him in the blankets then, warm slick woman flesh, and this smiling stone-eyed face that disappeared every so often, huddling down over his body as if she were building a fire there, trying to blow it into life. And apparently she succeeded, for his only recollection of the beach from then on was the sex, the stone-eyed girl and then another one astride him and under him and locked with him mouth to groin, sometimes just one of them alone and other times both, and yet there never seemed to be any release for him, only the tumescence, the fire the stone-eyed one had built in him and which the alcohol kept from going out, and so there was cheering too, he remembered that, voices urging him on, like a performing animal, a circus freak. Supersalt, they called him.
He remembered the floor of a darkened minibus, wrapped up in blankets and shivering as the stone-eyed girl huddled near him, bracing herself against the bumping of the vehicle. And then there was only silence, a great long tunnel of nothing, a sleep that could have been death for all he knew of it.
He woke in daylight alone in a cluttered room, a small efficiency apartment plastered with peeling posters of youth-cult and rebellion: the inevitable Che and W. C. Fields along with Henry Kissinger as a nude Cosmopolitan Man and other non-pictorial ones proclaiming such profundities as Shit and Bitch, Bitch, Bitch in artsy typography. Empty clotheslines crisscrossed the room above a floor strewn with sleeping bags and broken chairs and scattered books and sheet music and cans and ashtrays, along with a torn bass drum and a guitar without strings. The kitchenette, buried in beer cans and dirty dishes, was such a mess that Bone almost expected to see Mo come shuffling out of it—which was the wrong thought for him to have, for abruptly he was conscious then, aware of who he was and what had happened, and with that realization he also discovered his hangover, the cold dishwater that was his belly, the stake being driven into his head. Slowly he sat up, not surprised to discover that he had been sleeping on a davenport instead of a bed. Of three doors in the place, one opened into a closet and the other was obviously the front door, so he was about to set himself in the direction of the third, hoping there to find relief for his seared throat and aching bladder. But just as he was about to try to stand, the door opened and someone came out, a small dark creature with a boy’s haircut and build and clothes—rope sandals and Levi’s and a leather jacket over a UCSB T-shirt, whose slight pointed rise at the U and B suggested the creature might be female.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“Could be,” he admitted.
“Well, put something on, for God’s sake. Don’t just sit there showing off.”
Bone pulled a ratty blanket over his lap. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I thought you were a boy.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Standing, he pulled the blanket around him. “Uh, can I go in there now?” he said. “I’ve got problems.”
“You sure have.” She moved out of the doorway.
Bone did not ask for clarification. The problems he knew about were sufficient for now. Closing the door behind him, he did what he could to end them. After urinating for what seemed like twenty minutes, he drank a glass of cold water and promptly threw it up. Trying warm water then, he stood for a while staring at the derelict in the mirror, trying to psych him into keeping the water down. He was only mildly surprised to see that he had a bruise under his left eye and a cut running from his hairline down to his earlobe. It was already dried, a fine handsome scab.
Wrapping the blanket around him again, he went back into the apartment. The girl was standing at the front windows, which looked out on a straight ugly street bordered by California’s answer to the brownstone, four- and eight-unit stucco apartment houses, pastel boxes built to last a decade.
“Isla Vista?” he said.
She nodded sourly. “Yeah—the ghetto.”
“The kids on the beach—I take it they brought me here.”
“My roomies, yeah—Carla and Josie, the clap twins.”
“I hope you’re wrong.”
“You remember, then?”
“What?”
“The beach. Coming in out of the waves ‘like a fucking Greek god’—I believe that’s how Carla described it.”
Bone shook his head wonderingly, in pain. “Beautiful,” he said.
“Isn’t it? She didn’t specify which god though.”
“Bacchus.”
The girl looked dubious. “Aphrodite came out of the sea.”
“Okay—her, then.”
“No, Carla wouldn’t agree. She said you were spectacular, whatever that means.”
“Whatever.”
“But then of course I wasn’t there.”
“Why of course?”
“Because I’m the Virgin of Isla Vista—didn’t you know?”
“No, I’m afraid not. But congratulations anyway.”
“Well, that’s what everyone calls me.”
Bone said nothing as a fresh wave of nausea swept over him. He carefully sagged back onto the davenport.
“That or Monk,” she said.
“Fine,” he got out. “Keep up the good work.”
“It isn’t hard, believe me.”
“Good.”
“Josie’s at work, and Carla’s got an art class. She told me to take good care of you. She’s looking forward to meeting you sober.”
“You sound like an answering service.”
“That’s about it,” the girl admitted.
Bone asked her what time it was.
“A little after one.”
“I got any clothes here? Did they find-”
She was shaking her head. “Nope—they brought you just as they found you. In all your glory.”
He could not help groaning. “Beautiful. Oh Jesus, that is just beautiful.” He remembered having seventy dollars left after buying the bottle of scotch yesterday, fifty of which—two twenties and a ten—he had secreted in his wallet between his driver’s license and a three-year-old American Express card.
The wallet of course had been in his pants. And his pants were now in the sea.
“Where’d you leave your clothes?” the girl asked.
“On the beach.”
“Maybe they’re still there.”
Bone shook his head. “Tide was still rising.”
“How neat. When the tide brings it all in again, they’ll think you’re dead. You’ll be a free man. You can start a brand-new life.”
“Yeah—how neat.”
“It isn’t, huh?”
“I’m too successful with this one.”
“Feel kind of lousy, huh?”
He did not bother to answer.
“How much did you have?” she kept on.
“I wasn’t counting.”
“Obviously.”
She seemed to have nothing else in the world to do except stand there and stare at him, something like a lonely tomboy sister with a big brother back from the wars. Even sick as he was, the intensity of her interest embarrassed him and he wanted to tell her to get lost. Instead he asked if there was any coffee.
“Yeah, instant. You want some?”
“I could try.”
She nodded approvingly. “Bravo. That’s the spirit.”
While she busied herself in the cluttered kitchenette, Bone got up and rummaged through an equally cluttered closet until he came up with something he could wear, a white terry beach robe with a large Budweiser beer label printed on the back. Putting the robe on, he pulled the sash tighter than he should have and found himself struggling not to retch. His legs suddenly were fileted and his stomach felt as if it had been wadded by a large hand. With his head booming, he teetered back to the davenport.
From the kitchenette, the girl asked him who Mo was.
“Why?” he said. “What do you mean?”
“You talk in your sleep.”
“He’s just a guy I know.”
“And you’re in love with him?”
“Yeah, I’m mad about him.”
For a time the girl just stood there watching the kettle heating on the burner. Finally she said, “I know three things—Mo is a woman, she has a baby, and you are sorry. You are very sorry.”
Bone looked away from her, convinced that he had never felt worse in all his life. He could not remember a time when his body and spirit were so all-of-a-piece, so consonant in their pain and disrepair. It made him wonder why men held life precious. Just the possibility of there being days like this somehow devalued all the others, at least for him.
Idly, he looked out the window at a vacant lot across the street, where some students or street people had a fire going, a bonfire, of paintings, evidently some twenty-year-old artist finally throwing in the towel, succumbing to the forces of darkness. The paintings appeared to be portraits or figure studies, one of a nude woman whose golden skin turned a brief brown and then black and then disappeared altogether as the flames consumed her. And Bone could not help thinking of the blackened mummy in the clear plastic sack. His stomach crumpled again, pumped something bilious into his throat, where he choked it off, trembling, tear-blinded. He put his head down for a time. Then, drying his eyes, he looked up at the girl.